A serene memoir in which the author takes valuable time to regard the character of the Palestinian people and their way of...
Reflections of a young American wife and mother trying to make a home in war-torn Jerusalem.
A peripatetic writer whose first memoir, The Bread of Angels, chronicled her life in Damascus while learning Arabic, here Saldaña (English/Al-Quds Bard Coll.) chronicles the latest leg of her life’s journey: leaving the monastery in the Syrian desert she often visited to marry a French monk, Frédéric. An American from Texas who grew up Catholic, the author was from a vastly different world than her deeply devout husband. Yet they were both avid travelers, and after getting married in his provincial hometown in France, they decided to settle, implausibly, in Jerusalem. Born under a lucky star, as his mother described him, Frédéric found the couple a home in a huge old house next to a monastery on Nablus Road, just outside the gates of the Old City: the “scar” between the Palestinian and Israeli sides. Saldaña’s Arab neighbors—e.g., the falafel seller who claimed her front steps for business—were intrigued by her and her Christianity as well as by her ability to speak Arabic with them; she wondered if they thought she was a spy. Many of her neighbors were bossy yet well-meaning, and when she finally got pregnant with her first child, their devotion and kindness deeply moved her. However, there was the constant specter of war just outside the borders of the neighborhood, where the Israeli soldiers constantly harassed the Palestinians for their identification papers, and the tension remained high. With limpid, often shimmering prose, Saldaña builds an impressive sense of genuine emotion, and she vividly explores the array of life in that seething section of Jerusalem. The couple’s first child was born in a hospital in Bethlehem—among other ironies beautifully understated.
A serene memoir in which the author takes valuable time to regard the character of the Palestinian people and their way of life.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-3905-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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